While Lady Gaga has dabbled with various different hair colors over the course of her career, there’s no denying that platinum blonde has always been her signature shade. She experimented with a temporary periwinkle-blue for the Golden Globes earlier this month, but at the SAG Awards this past Sunday, it was back to blonde for Mother Monster. And yet, thanks to her longtime colorist Patti Song, she’s still managed to keep her hair healthy despite how often she subjects it to bleach and heat styling. In a recent interview with Refinery29, Song shared her secrets for maintaining Gaga’s strands, as well as how she gets the perfect shade of platinum.

When Song met Gaga in 2009, the singer was dealing with a ton of breakage toward the front of her hair, so the first order of business was to get it healthy again. “[I told her], ‘We’re going to bleach your hair every three weeks, grow it out to a bob, and then you’re going to start wearing wigs,'” Song explained. “To fix her breakage, we attached about ten single extensions to the one-inch broken pieces, but the rest was all her hair,” she added. Song noted that wearing wigs is an excellent option for people in the public eye who put their hair through a lot and could use a break.

Song also revealed how she gets Gaga’s gorgeous, icy-white hair color. “I use what you call a ‘virgin bleach’ application method, [which means] instead of highlighting or painting small piece by small piece, you coat the hair in bleach,” she explained. “This is basic coloring knowledge, but the best way to avoid banding or uneven color is starting the bleach at the ends and working your way up to the roots,” she added. The reason for this, Song said, is because the closer you put the bleach to the scalp, the faster the process will go due to the heat that radiates from the scalp.

In regard to maintenance, Song explained that you never want to wait more than five weeks between touch-ups, as this can make it so that your hair can’t lift the color properly, resulting in roots that develop at two different speeds and the aforementioned band-like appearance. In fact, this is precisely what happened to Allure contributor Elizabeth Denton and she ended up having to start from scratch.